


Strike-Out

by TheVolter



Category: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Gen, Meta, Murder Mystery, Parallel Universes, What-If
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-22
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-03-08 15:29:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3214235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVolter/pseuds/TheVolter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say there's a parallel universe for everything, so why not let one unfortunate soul live out her life like everyone else? </p><p>Contains spoilers for the entirety of Dangan Ronpa 2 and, inevitably, some important plot points of Dangan Ronpa 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter Two, Part One - Divergence

Sometimes, at the beginning of vaguely unique stories that begin after their respective backstories do, they add an insert about how the vast majority of stories start at the beginning. Which they certainly aren't wrong about. They then might begin to presumptously sing the work its praises about how it is not a normal story, probably unfamiliar to the readers, or something along similar lines.

This is a story that begins at the aptly-named Chapter Two.

The difference is that this backstory is one that the readers are completely, utterly, near-tiringly familiar with. One Hajime Hinata, eyes full of stars and ready for anything, finds that his new prestigious school (or rather, a certain animatronic bear heavily involved in its backstory) is out to morph his friends-to-be into masterminds of homicide, using their environments and classmates' own capabilities to their advantage to get away with grisly murder. Hell, all that he's seen is the metaphorical training wheels of prodigy-level investigation, with resident Porkfeet being skewered by the perverted chef at a dinner party gone terribly, terribly wrong.

This is not just a story about Hinata, of course.

This is a story about the babyfaced mob boss mourning the sister he didn't even remember dying.

This is a story about his sworn bodyguard hitwoman who has an unsettling tendency to take things too far.

This is a story about a calm, possibly too calm, spacey game addict.

Hell, this is even a story about the delusional occult fanatic who's more capable of a perfect crime than anyone could predict.

But more than anything, this is a story about the opinionated photographer who's about to take action about the crime she barely remembers being an accomplice to.

\---------------

The sun poured in through the windows of sixteen cabins to give fourteen sleepy teenagers the familiar slap-in-the-face reminder that they were still on Murder Island, despite what fleeting visions their minds eye had been entertaining themselves with for the past few hours.

Mahiru Koizumi still couldn't quite believe what was happening.

It was like something out of a Derren Brown experiment. She'd been given evidence of a murder and posed a scenario of her covering for it. And something from the dark recesses of her mind told her that it wasn't just that godawful bear feasting on misery again. There was the fact that she couldn't help projecting herself onto D-ko. There was the fact that the more she played of the game, the more she felt that itch, that unending feeling of her own subconscious hiding things from her that she'd never unearth without anything short of a neuroscientist. But worst of all, the most damning thing that fueled her dread was the strictly professional admiration she had for the photos in the envelope. Everything about correct distance allowing for proper focus, flash used only when necessary to garner scene-setting lighting... And would you believe it, they were all taken with an analog camera not unlike the one she was absent-mindedly staring at from her bed.

And Koizumi wouldn't be who she was if she didn't put herself at the center of the problem. This time, it wouldn't even be that hard to get away with being nosy, not least of all due to the lack of moral crusaders on the island. All she'd have to do is gather as many relevant people as possible to get a solid discussion going. The photos would get most of them over to her side in no time, and everyone would have to forgive her for playing the game under her circumstances, right? 

So after a short bout of self-assurance and generally getting pumped up, she ventured into the outside world to find a couple of surprises waiting for her. For one, she had mail from Saionji asking to meet up at the beachhouse at 2:30. Somehow Koizumi wasn't too taken aback at the prospect of mind-readers considering what turns her life had recently been taking, but she had to guess that Saionji had played the game too and was making a decision that was frankly leaps and bounds above what the general consensus about her was. Of course, she pushed any suspicions that were growing to the back of her mind and prided herself on the choice of not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

The second surprise gave the gift horse a good hoof to the face. When she came back from feeding that damned parasite in the lodge, she learnt that the girls were going to get together and have a nice day out relaxing and generally getting the most out of the paradise that they were trapped in. At the beach right outside the meeting place. Instead of being useful to her. She was thankful at the very least that it was marginally later than the meeting she was now committed to, but that wouldn't get the other half of the gang to where she needed them to be. And now she had an appointment that she wasn't ready to cancel in case whatever possessed Saionji vacated by tomorrow.

After a few hours of thinking about it, the time had come and she was in the beachhouse with the last person she wanted to see about Kuzuryuu's dead sister: Kuzuryuu himself. He had the same old grimace on his face, the one that he seemed to always have when he wasn't shouting or giving death threats and generally raising his voice. Koizumi had an intense dislike for him, amazingly enough, though she felt like she didn't have to raise her voice on her own as Saionji would probably rip into him without holding back. All she had to do was wait.

But Kuzuryuu was too eager for that, apparently. Plainly dredging up cockiness in his expression and tone, he turned to face Koizumi and said "Solved the mystery yet?"

He well and truly had her there, much as her voice concealed it. "I can atone if you'll stop being smug about your own sister dying."

"Coming from the one who let my sister die herself!"

Silence. Part of her wished that Saionji would burst in and start being as nonsensical and loud as he could be, maybe say stuff about her "big sis" doing no wrong and such. And yet she persisted in her absence for whatever reason.

But then the connection formed in her mind, and it was hard not to fly in the face of her own safety for the sake of her justice.

"If we're saying that the game was accurate, then that would mean it was you who killed E-ko, right?"

The reaction was instant. "That's not what this is about, and you know it!"

She pressed on. "What happened to your sister was tragic, sure... But you didn't have to kill, either!"

"J-just shut up and answer my question, dammit! Do you or do you not remember what happened in the game?"

"You didn't have the right!" Of course her sense of justice would come into this. "Judging people's sins like that... nobody has the right to do that!. No, revenge as a whole... is just wrong!"

Pause.

The silence carried on, at least for Koizumi, as the split second it took for Kuzuryuu's rage to boil over was the one that she felt was the longest. His eyes weren't staring daggers into hers, not anymore. They had shifted to glare at a table with a list of emotions that she could barely believe she was registering. Anger. Fear. Determination. And she could sure as hell feel the adrenaline like it was spraying out of his open mouth. She felt stupid that she hadn't seen the table before, not least of all after the party fiasco just a few days ago. The damning metal bat that made her feel like she was looking at that photo - taking that godawful photo once again. But the world was moving at a snail's pace to her, like the world itself hinged around this single moment.

And then his eyes darted back to face her, only they were more looking through her than at her. Behind her. Eyes that screamed surprise. She could even feel the glare of a third party making the back of her neck feel cold in this split second, this damn headache of an experience that felt more like she was looking through the lens of a digital camera dated a century from now. But she'd already been reaffirming herself with the knowledge that she shouldn't look million-dollar gift horses in their spouts of life-rejuvenating miracle water. Besides, whatever she was about to not do was probably going to end up with a bad afternoon in general for both her and the still suspiciously missing Saionji. She was just glad that the bat she had glimpsed in a fraction of a fraction of a second wasn't drenched in blood.

Her knees clicked forwards, her body sunk lower towards the ground and her head lolled back to watch the metal bat fly across where her mop of red hair would have been a few seconds ago. But the adrenaline had yet to subside to the overwhelming terror, and the deafening sound of her own heartbeat pulsing through her head wouldn't let her register any semblance of the photographer's well-loved common sense for the next few seconds.

And what a beautiful next few seconds they were.

Time snapped back to its relative speed as the tension in her legs built like never before, sending the skull that the attacker was so ready to bludgeon a split second ago, a mortifyingly long split second ago, careening into her chin. Her momentum didn't stop there, of course. Sending her legs up to meet her own upper-body, she made a V shape that met Pekoyama's belly as she laid dumbfounded on the ground after an already painful fall. And still barely conscious of what she was doing, she used the momentum from the sickening bounce to straighten her body and land on her two feet, bracing and stopping herself from tumbling on her face with her outstretched arms.

Nekomaru would have been proud.

And it all came rushing to her when she was done. The sounds of it all, the clattering of metal hitting the ground and the heavy breathing of the woman she would have called a friendly stranger not half an hour ago. The pain of the back of her head that made her feel like she would never quite be as objectively intelligent ever again, and the irony that came with the feeling. Confusion, of course, that oddly flew in the face of the three things that she realized in the moment of normalcy she had to catch her breath.

For one, she was still in a closed room with a murderer and an amazingly hypocritical accomplice.

She also knew a place rather close by that was probably swarming with potential witnesses.

And finally, she knew exactly who just witnessed that miracle of a stunt that she just pulled.

She sprang off her arms and rose to see the man who so perfectly reflected the bewilderment that flooded her mind. And as she turned and made a break for the door closest to the diner, she could hear the words escape Kuzuryuu's mouth with what little oxygen he could muster up.

"...a photographer?"

And she embraced the sunlight she was bathed in like she would a son.


	2. Chapter Two, Part Two - Aftermath

Paralysis was only one of very many things that Pekoyama felt in that moment, and not all of them were familiar to her. 

She could feel the ground pressing up against her back as she lay down on the ground. This, funnily enough, made her feel even more like she was just dreaming. And yet, there was too much else that she was experiencing to deny the situation its grave reality.

Confusion was another. She had enough of that to crush the skulls of anybody on the island that her master deemed worthy of it.

She took the most comfort in the pain, as she'd been told many times as a hitwoman that feeling it meant that you weren't dead yet.

As much as she might have wanted to deny it, she did have a modicum of fear. If that monster could outmaneuver her in close quarters, god knows what she could do to her master. And she knew full well that her master wasn't one to step down from unwinnable fights.

Relief came from the mutter she heard mere seconds later.

But the thing that she felt the most of all nearly dwarfed everything else she could feel in that stunned near-silence. It was one that she hadn't felt in a long time, and one that she had never let rest before. She'd had failures in the past. She'd been a disappointment before, and she was usually the first to direct the blame her way. Making mistakes is only human, and tools always have the possibility to be faulty, of course. The thing that engulfed her mind and made her burn up inside like her insides were being made into mulch was beyond that.

The all-encompassing shame that she felt put herself into a new perspective. It wasn't even relative to jealousy, the feeling that she got when she thought about how much worse in comparison she was to others. She'd been told that many a time before. How could she have avoided it, being close to a clan of people who trained as much as she did for longer than she had. It wasn't like she was being told by another faceless trainee that she'd never be enough to compare to her master, that she would never make the grade. It wasn't even as if she were being shown definitive evidence of how the techniques she'd been using her whole life don't reach minimum requirements for her own job.

It was more like she had brought her life's work to a science fair and had it stomped to an unrecognizable, near laughably pathetic shape by a fourth grader.

And she'd just gotten used to going home with the elders' bootprints, too.

Pekoyama felt like she was wasting her time.

The young master turned at the sound of movement, and watched his guardian get up from her pose of defeat with eyes red in more than just colour. She spoke with a tone that unsuccessfully tried to mask the brimstone she felt scorching her very being.

"Where is she?"

The young master broke his silence with a voice that he wouldn't have called his own. "Gone. L-look, maybe murder isn't the best of decisions right now, considering she's probably already gathering a crowd..."

Part of Pekoyama was grateful that the damn infernal photographer had lost the rights to a name. "Well, who's to bet I'm the faster runner?"

Leaving whatever her master had shouted to dissipate in the air, she chalked it up to a necessary disobedience and charged outside to give the newly-formed crowd all the evidence that they needed. And as the ladies dropped to curl up into varying balls, as the mechanic and animal breeder took up what they thought were defensive stances and the remainder just stood motionless, the photographer had her personal favorite comment to add to the scene that the beachgoers were somehow experiencing firsthand.

"Told you so."

\---------------

After the outburst of overwhelming chaos had frittered away, the islanders were faced with the clean-up job from hell. The first step was shutting Souda up before he could suggest tying Pekoyama up and dooming her to the same room that Komaeda was confined in. And you can't have one murderer walk free while the other rots. With gritted teeth, the islanders welcomed Komaeda back to the outside world and wished him the best for his re-institution by glaring their happy intentions directly into his soul. And all that his signature casual laugh did was remind everybody how long it'd been since they had heard it, being the least imitable tic that they would ever know in their lives.

An explanation for the spectacle was had, one way or another. After some vague roundabout descriptions from Koizumi, the group eventually decided to just crowd around the arcade machine and see for themselves. Maybe it was the fact that they'd nearly lost another friend that stopped them from dog-piling either of the guilty parties. Or maybe the redhead was just overly paranoid in a world that seemed to welcome vehement distrust. Either way, she felt like she had fallen out of favor with enough dangerous people in one day to warrant her less-than-open behavior. 

Having enough damning things against Kuzuryuu didn't warrant a discussion in his eyes, though he did have the common courtesy to stay after shouting the remarkably unsurprising obscenities.

And with the afternoon's passing, the new development of life on the island faded until it was just a dull throb in the back of everyone's head. Hinata took to drowning his faint headache by going to the library and reading a book. It certainly wasn't something he'd normally do, but he figured that it wasn't something he particularly loathed either. He'd had the ego boost of the trial for murder proving to all, not least himself, that his (admittedly ridiculous) hairdo wasn't just covering a glorified eggshell, now it was just time to see if brains was his actual forgotten talent. Or something. The intense boredom that followed the wrap-up of a series of intriguing events was enough for to make him want to do most things he hadn't tried already.

To fit his attitude about being in a library in the first place, he made his way to a corner, did a pirouette that he was eternally thankful nobody saw and grabbed a book at random. By some remarkable stretch of luck, it wasn't in French or anything equally impossible for him to understand. And it was a book that he found rather interesting, at that. Before he knew it, he'd spent at least an hour vaulting mental hurdles and educating himself on yet another subject that would probably never help him when he left the island. And at least being a detective was useful to the people he was stuck with at the moment.

The book certainly gave him food for thought. He wouldn't have often taken what was mentioned in the pages very seriously, but then again he wouldn't have often poked around a dead body to save his own life. In fact, most of his odd interest in the book came from that fact alone, and how he'd spent his days-

"Hey."

Hinata spent a couple seconds recovering from his minor heart attack to turn and see Koizumi sitting on another library armchair in completely the wrong way. Shuffling around on the side of the chair, she brought her hands up to her eyes and pulled at the lower sockets, while stretching her mouth as flatly as she possibly could. Hinata's lack of response, ignoring the blank stare, prompted an explanation.

"I'll give you a hint. Red."

And there was the topic he'd gone to the library to escape from. He lowered the book to his knees and let his head loll back in clear distaste.

"Okay, I guess I should have seen the devil's eyes as a warning flag. Not that I'm gonna let you get away with victim blaming." She grinned.

Bringing his head back up to make eye contact, he made a face as empty of emotions as the subject matter. "It's not like you to crack jokes. What gives?"

"Near-death experience and all. Probably." She flopped back into the chair in yet another wrong position. "Please, distract me. What are you reading?"

Shutting the book (and in hindsight, losing his page), Hinata held up the cover to display. It took all of a few seconds for Koizumi to have her eyes dart from the book, to the sign behind him that said "non-fiction" and back once again to Hinata's face.

"...Parallel universes?"

"Yep." Hinata waited for a comment, and when he didn't get one he took hold of the conversation. "I mean, it's pretty interesting to think about, right? The idea that there's a parallel universe for everything?"

"That's gonna include one where I get up and kill you where you sit with my bare hands. And one where I get up, jump into the waters outside and drown myself. And one where I died in my sleep this morning because large blowflies entered through my nostrils and blocked off the flow of oxygen to my lungs."

He raised his eyebrows. "Morbid. Okay, it'd have to be within reason. Like, it'd have to be possible in some way, right?"

"So it wouldn't make people do things that they wouldn't normally do? That's the main complaint people have about the idea, I thought." She fell silent with a look that all but proved to Hinata that she was looking for a new way to discredit the theory. 

"Well, I mean, the book isn't really in favor of the theory. It's just kinda interesting to think about, is all. There's a lot of crazies who believe this stuff, you know."

"Do you believe it, Hinata? I mean, we ARE trapped on a mysteriously deserted tourist-based island with a homicidal Tickle Me Elmo. The alternative to this world being an extreme screw-up of an alternate universe is that this was how things always were supposed to be."

There was a short pause.

"...Well, God has a wicked sense of humor, considering that goddamn chef was the first of us to kill somebody."

In the instant of snickering that followed, they knew that they were going to have yet another entirely unproductive evening. And somehow, all felt right once more in the world that they knew was all too wrong.

They didn't have to know about the plans of a select few others. Not yet, anyway.


	3. Chapter Two, Part Three - Observation

She was awake now.

She had thought that it would help just mere minutes ago.  
She had been sharing head space with nightmares that only served to remind her.  
She may have reassured herself that it wasn't her fault multiple times, but she knew that nobody was to blame but herself for it.  
And those actions were definitely her doing, and her own choice to be involved. She wasn't foolish enough to dump regrets on the people who set the scene for it.  
She had been watching visions of the damned act, screaming from the non-existant backseat in the hopes that she would just _stop._  
Screaming at herself to just will herself awake and out of this personal hell.  
She had woken up drenched in sweat from the mere memory.

Trio the Punch.

And Chiaki knew her dangerous tendency to fall into deep sleeps like the back of her hand.

Well, "hand".

She was just data, of course. Data fortunate enough to become as flesh-and-blood as her creators, at least to fifteen other flesh-and-blood teenagers. Data also unfortunate enough to watch the people she had been created to watch over kill themselves one by one. She, in particular, was data that had been given extensive knowledge (and passion) of the gaming medium as her ultimate talent. Extensive enough to be able to walk into an arcade and list off every light gun game, but also extensive enough to have a backlog of games to avoid. She was even told that they were often not worth the hit in pride for the take-away experience. Lumped in with such titles as Bad Rats, Big Rigs and a whole host of simulator games.

The difference between those examples and Trio the Punch was simple: the prior examples were bad enough to be laughably bad. All she could think about while moving from left to right destroying everything as a sheep was how it was perfect evidence of the development team undergoing severe mental trauma. The ending only stood to confuse her further, flying in the face of a sensible conclusion that nearly every other piece of media led to. And by the time she was done murdering those innocent animals, she never wanted to go into that dark, gloomy section of the archives ever again.

Chiaki only hoped that the powerless people watching over her, if they could indeed read her mind, would never come to research it further than a title in a row of most likely better ones.

It was breakfast time, regardless of how much she was to mope. Just as sleep made its way into her new life and made itself comfortable, regular digestion was needed to keep herself going now. She was endlessly thankful that humans had turned daily requirements into a hobby, as the new floodgates of taste had certainly thrown her for a loop when they started the beta testing. Smell was another thing that she felt she would never get used to. And yet, if philosophers had the same understanding of sight as she did, they might be shipped off to sanitariums for talking about it.

She was going on a tangent again. Even in her own thoughts.

She wouldn't trade her wonderfully imperfect humanity away for anything.

And so she found herself sitting at a table with a plate of food idly munching away while doing what she was made to do: observe.

\---------------

Most of the islanders were keeping to themselves at their own table, not that it kept them far away from conversation. Chiaki knew well that the goal of the eating area was to encourage conversation and growth as a group, and so anybody could spin around in their seats and talk to the person behind them. This may not have been their design choice if they knew that the murders were going to start, though it did make the dining area feel like it was buzzing with activity.

The vast majority of the buzz was coming from a few select locations, such as Nekomaru lecturing Akane on improving her form and Souda explaining his inner potential and worth in the long run to a very absent-minded Sonia, but the rest of the crowd seemed to be adding to the noise with the clatter of cutlery on fancy plates. So she looked for the smaller conversations. Saionji was pointing out the subtle flaws in everybody around her to her beloved "big sis" as the sister in question kept her eyes forward and intermittently nodded her head. Gundham was detailing to Hinata the abridged version of how the dark gods of destruction found their way into the bodies of tiny creatures and how these tiny creatures inevitably found their way into his care. Kuzuryuu was listing off the new rules and practices that Pekoyama was to follow now that everybody knew of the two's connection, not that she was looking his way.

Pekoyama was actually staring daggers into the back of Koizumi's head as Kuzuryuu rambled on. And apparently, these daggers were sharp enough to prick the redhead's neck and make her turn to see what was giving her an unsettling feeling. All it took was a few seconds for her eyes to lose their wideness, and for regret about not sitting a few tables further away to set in.

The silence of the eye contact made things all the more alien to one and more personal to the other. Their respective dining partners turned to notice the intensity building beside them and were all but ready to start the barrage of obscenities before Koizumi drew in a sharp breath.

"Are you gonna say something?"

Pekoyama answered with her silence.

Millions of loose thoughts formed a cyclone in her head, making her itch for all of them to be concisely spoken and addressed in a formal, elegant and very explanatory way. Koizumi wasn't quite a miracle worker yet, despite the miracle that she had been trying to wipe from her memory overnight, and so she stood there breathing faster than before with disgust plastered on her face.

Saionji articulated her thoughts just fine. "For somebody so good at listening to orders, you sure can be an ignorant BITCH sometimes."

Kuzuryuu gripped Pekoyama's shoulder. "Just stop staring, Pekoyama. We're not walking away from this as winners without violence."

Pekoyama kept focused on the ever-hateable Koizumi.

Saionji got up from her seat, eyes rolling in that irritable manner that she was so good at doing. "Violence, huh? Got so much vitriol for a person like Big Sis that you'd swear it was pent-up or something."

The more Pekoyama kept staring into the eyes of Koizumi, the more things she could find to hate about her.

Saionji had started walking closer to the hitwoman. "She's a photographer, guys! She's a brilliant example of a human being, I'd say. And you want to tell me that your own fuckin' incompetence in an assassination means that she's the bane of your existence?"

Pekoyama hated that she would act like she had the moral high ground in any argument. She hated the way she hunted for people to belittle. She hated her right down to the way her mind worked.

And yet cheer resonated in Saionji's voice. "I'd say it's something in YOUR past we need to look into. Is it a single event that you haven't ever gotten over? Or is it the belligerent sexual tension between you two psychopaths in general? Either way, I can help! _I_ can be your shoulder to cry on, you fucking assholes! Let me be your _UNWIND!_ "

Pekoyama hated her clothes. She hated her horrible tie. She hated her freckles. The tightened grip from her young master was the only thing anchoring her to reality.

Saionji came to a stop besides Pekoyama. The forced enthusiasm fell from her face as her voice fitted to suit it.

"Hey."

Pekoyama kept her eyes forward.

"If you don't start looking at me, I'll make a stress ball out of your fuckin' hair."

Pekoyama kept her eyes forward for roughly two seconds before her head was twisted to stare into the eyes of the damned photographer's assistant. Her hand shot up to grab one of the oversized pigtails in front of her, yanking it down towards the table with enough force to ensure that the rest of her head would come with it. The audible crack of skull meeting wood made half of the bystanders who stayed out of the issue for their own safety leap out of their chairs to assist the now-unconscious Saionji.

But she wasn't done, of course. She struggled free of the grasp of her very panicked master and began the beeline for the seemingly stunned Koizumi, letting the background noise of all-round chaos fuel her desire to inflict _pain._

She spun as she reached the end of her short dash, extending a single arm out intent on smashing into the side of Koizumi's head and sending her flying to the floor.

She brought her arm up with speed unmatched to stop the blur of a swift strike, killing its momentum in its entirety.

It felt like her arm had just hit a brick wall.

It felt like her arm had just been hit by a train.

Once again, she had no idea how it had happened.

Once again, she had no idea why it had happened.

They both bit their lips from the pain.

Pekoyama was dragged away from the table by a very much finished Kuzuryuu, as the rest of the dining area was left to clean up from their second shitstorm in the span of two days. And somehow, the violence didn't make Pekoyama feel like much of a winner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, thanks to the recent cyclone I've had some time to actually write more of this in-between mooching off what little power sources were available to me. Part Four is done and will be released in a little while for the sake of finishing the part after it, as well as deriving pleasure from the four people who were actually patiently waiting for the next part. 
> 
> It's really fun to write Saionji's dialogue, and the second half of this part as a whole was just a ball to put into words. Part Two was, admittedly, a bit of a drag to write and the end of it probably showed. This part and the next two parts after it are a great deal better, I promise. 
> 
> Also, when I said that criticism is wanted, I seriously mean criticism is wanted. Be a dickhead about it if you actually have a point to get across. At the moment, it just seems like I've been feeding a brick wall with a mouth that asks after weeks of starvation if it can have some more table scraps. YES I DON'T UPDATE OFTEN AND I REALLY WISH THIS WASN'T THE CASE.


	4. Chapter Two, Part Four - Deadline

"Hey, hey, I wouldn't be upset about something so kick-ass. You were awesome in there!"

"It wasn't awesome."

"It was!"

"Akane." Nekomaru cut in on the exchange. "It was talented enough to make me impressed, no less envious, but I wouldn't glorify what happened here."

As if their breakfast escapade wasn't enough to fill their plates, the group of twelve (minus two uncooperative and two deceased members) now had to create a game plan for their new situation: as Hinata had put it, "somebody very intent on and very capable of murder is loose somewhere on the islands." Search parties were very clearly out of the question. So, after the mess that was the dining hall was cleaned up and Saionji was given proper treatment, they went back to have a meeting.

While some asked Koizumi straight up what the hell she was doing with those kind of reflexes, the nicer ones of the crowd were trying to comfort her to conceal the fact that they very much wanted to know as well. And it was pressuring as hell for the girl herself to not know either. This wasn't at all helped by the fact that they had arranged the chairs in a circle, very much reminiscent of the class trial she felt was going to happen soon. _Call it the trial for the death of my normalcy_ , she thought.

"But seriously," blurted Nekomaru, "Talented barely describes it. I could make you a sports celebrity overnight!"

Ibuki perked up and made her best attempt at a deep voice. "I could take you there..." She winced. "Blech. Why'd you make Ibuki quote such a _blech song_?"

Of course, the round-table discussion was going this well pretty much across the board. Gundam cut in by grabbing Koizumi's shoulders, reanimating her attention span like a lightning bolt. "Okay, warrior girl, how about we disregard the past... five minutes? I believe that's right. How about we act like they never happened and you just tell us outright what your real-world anchor for your power is?"

As the initial surprise wore away, he was left with a blank stare rather than an explanation.

"Right, well, we all know that this new power imbalance is a result of meddling with mythos, but it's-"

"Could you take your hands off my shoulders?"

He looked down at his feet while he did just that. The redhead wasn't done. "Jesus, people, is it too much to have good reflexes? The best photos are the unexpected ones, you know?"

Souda brought his general skittish attitude to the table. "But you completely TANKED that! I mean, getting hit at that speeds by somebody who's PAID to hit people is j-just..."

"And with no damage!" added Ibuki.

"Please don't kill me." concluded a now very timid Souda.

"Me neither!" added Ibuki.

Sonia was the first to object. "Well, just because she put on a brave face, doesn't mean she didn't feel the strike of an experienced hitwoman."

"What she said." Koizumi was happy enough with that for an answer.

"W-well we can't just leave a b-broken bone untreated, surely..." Mikan's demeanor was clear even from the distance between dining area and doorway. Koizumi's expression abandoned the forced smile, and not because of the painful verbal tics this time.

"You're back. What happened to Hiyoko?"

"A-ah, yeah! That's what I came back for!" She fidgeted. "Well, aside from a minor case of lopsided pigtails... aheh, okay that wasn't actually funny I'm sorry, uh, she'll be fine with some ice and a little bit of quiet time in her cabin."

A sigh of relief came selectively throughout the dining area. "Your joke sounded a lot like something the girl herself would say, honestly." said Nekomaru.

"Please don't hate me."

It took Akane a few seconds and a glance over at the small pile of blonde hair on Pekoyama's old table to get it.

Koizumi rolled up her sleeve to show the red mark the blow had left. "I wouldn't think this is broken, but it sure as hell hurt for a few moments after the damn thing was born. And Mikan, really," She sighed and then immediately regretted it for the sake of her next statement, "we don't hate you."

Silence lasted for a few seconds, but it quickly gave way. "Are we done here?" Hinata mumbled. "Free time isn't as common as I'd like, you know."

Sonia concurred. "I'd like to stop by the library, honestly."

"Ibuki needs to practice!"

"I need to hide." sniffled Souda.

And so the first round-table discussion came to a close leaving a fairly satisfied Koizumi sitting with the last few stragglers in the bare-bones circle. And with an afternoon ahead of her free to do whatever she pleased, she felt happy that nobody had walked away from the discussion doubting her.

Souda doubted her, as much as he wanted to be able to sleep soundly through the afternoon.

Chiaki doubted her, as much as she wanted to believe that Elder Scrolls stealth damage bonuses were real.

Hinata doubted her, as much as he wanted suspicions against her to dissipate.

Gundam doubted her, not actually for want of his Lovecraftian explanations to come true this time.

And Pekoyama still hated her.

It was a good time to be blissfully, nearly willfully ignorant in the case of Mahiru Koizumi.

\----------------

Chiaki toyed with the piece of paper, subtly crumpling it every time it made its way through the gauntlet of fingers. There was yet another example of the pointless hobbies in humanity that seemed to welcome her with open arms. To her, it was like a reaffirmation of her ability to feel, which just raised questions about why everybody else seemed to fiddle with things in moments of relative silence. Part of her felt like it was some kind of hint that everybody else was just as human as she was, or just as inhuman as she should be. Or something.

Ahem.

Chiaki saw him from a little while away, leaning up against a wall like she expected him to. She meant that it fit his personality and his general demeanor. She didn't exactly have it written down anywhere and she didn't have bets firm in her mind that he was going to be in a pose like it when she turned up. She was more surprised that he had turned up early rather than late, and she was surprised that he had turned up at all considering the circumstances, but the letter didn't lie and she didn't ever doubt that the letter had lied, nor did she see a weapon of any kind around him on the off chance that it was just to lure her out on her own and dispatch of her. The more she thought about these things, the more she felt like Ibuki.

...Ahem.

Kuzuryuu was there by the ruins. Leaning up against a wall. She'd gotten a letter a bit earlier in the day, not that she heard any mail arrive at the cabin, but it was definitely there when she checked. Okay, back on track. She didn't have the foggiest idea why Kuzuryuu wanted to speak with her, of all people, but she was inclined to trust in the people on the island. Also the time of the meetup. 9:50. Regardless of the specifications of the time, she could only guess that he just wanted to keep the meeting a secret from the rest of the island-goers. Sort of like how people are hesitant to let others know about their therapists. Maybe.

And while it was a pleasure to know that people thought of her as some kind of moral beacon to look up to, it wasn't her most precise analysis ever. The amount of mental gymnastics she was doing was enough to tell her that the scenario she was going into was out of the ordinary. At least for her. So maybe she _was_ going to be murdered by Kuzuryuu after all. Or he was ready to sic Pekoyama on her when he gave a signal.

She looked around.

No Pekoyama. Which was perhaps even worse than her being here. At least if Pekoyama was here, Chiaki could run. Or leave a dying message of some kind. Or bring backup. Why didn't she bring backup? She already knew the answer; she'd been brought out by a fellow classmate by letter. Which was not a request she could turn down. That information was nearly scary to her, as if anybody knew her weakness to friendship they'd have a fairly easy time axing her and dumping the body in the ocean. The sense that she was sidetracking herself crept up on her once again and she eventually fell back into the usual idea that she should just be happy. Happy around somebody who seems suspicious in his openness. But happy.

Kuzuryuu pushed off the wall when he realised that Chiaki was arriving. He had a look on his face that seemed to mask a whole host of raging emotions in its not-quite-blank-ness. Sort of like he plainly refused to smile for the sake of some personal moral code. Or the opposite of a moral code. Regardless, he was eager to talk.

"Uh, hey."

And he nearly got there. Chiaki responded with a greeting of her own, before the floodgates were opened.

"Y-you don't think everybody hates me, do you?"

She thought that was likely. "Well, you haven't done the _best_ things to prove yourself, but I wouldn't say they outright hate you..."

"So that's a yes?"

Yeah. "No, no, it just means you'll have a harder time getting on their better side without doing things differently." 

He sighed. "Is it even about me at this point? Everybody's going mental about Peko, no doubt."

He had raised a point a bit more interesting than she was expecting from him. "...If you were going to ignore the few who would call you a hypocrite, renouncing her actions might be the best thing for you to do at the moment. Unless distancing yourself from a childhood friend is too much for you."

A genuine smile appeared on Kuzuryuu's face. "Well, I kind of already did. She's in her cabin at the moment, reflecting on how much I chewed her out this morning. She's probably feeling a little bit conflicted right now because of Koizumi." He opened his mouth, then closed it with a frown.

Chiaki returned a genuine smile of her own, truly impressed with how he'd acted today. "Go on."

The smile didn't come back. "Well, she's pretty terrifying in her own right. I've watched her flawlessly counter my professionally trained bodyguard twice now. I've seen her winded for the first time in my life, and it's by somebody who says she's just a photographer. I mean..." He slowly spun around and slammed his forehead into the wall, letting it rest there.

"I can't help but hate her myself. I'm scared that Peko's gonna die, man."

Chiaki was silent for a bit as she determined the best thing to say to him. When Kuzuryuu turned his head back, very clearly on the verge of tears, she formed a serious expression to go with the eye contact and said the first thing she thought might work.

"Well, if anything happens to her, you know who to suspect first."

As much as that sentence sounded horrible to her as she played it back to herself over and over again in her head, she got the feeling that it worked. The look of awe that flooded his eyes, the faster rise and fall of his chest and the sniffling followed by a tilt of the head to crack a stiff neck muscle all concluded in a signature smug grin, possibly with a little bit less smugness than usual.

"Yeah. Heh, you're absolutely right. You really know how to get through to somebody, you know?"

Chiaki felt that warm fuzzy feeling inside that reminded her once again how fantastic it was to be human.

Kuzuryuu leaned up against the wall again. "Well, okay, I think I've wasted enough of your time. What did you call me out here for?"

And Chiaki's motherly expression faltered. "I didn't call you out here. You sent me a letter asking to meet about now, right?"

Kuzuryuu's cheeriness melted away as well. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a horribly crumpled but legible letter, passing it on to her. She pulled out the letter that she received and held the two side-by-side. The two of them flinched at the sound of an announcement, and they looked up at the closest monitor with terror in their eyes.

"Good evening, you bastards! It's 10:00, which means it's..."

The rest of the announcement flew right over their heads as they bolted over the bridge and back, far back to the cabins. Saionji, head wrapped up with the bandage they were told to expect. Puffing and panting, they stumbled over to one half of the walkway each.

Saionji couldn't resist. "My, my, am I expected not to call scandal here? I wouldn't want my own hitwoman turned on me, but if you have to be this conspicuous about things I guess I have no-"

"Everyone, we need you out here right now!"

"Get your asses out here already!"

Saionji winced and covered her ears. "Well, jeez, no need to be so loud about it."

When the majority had meandered outside, they began. "Okay, one of you pricks better admit to a prank before things get out of hand here!"

Chiaki poked him in the side. "We received two letters that arranged a meetup tonight, though neither of us wrote them. Has this happened to anybody else?"

Five people raised their hands. Chiaki could do the math. "Who's missing their partner, then?"

Koizumi waved her hand. "Pekoyama wanted to stay behind to do some shopping or something. Don't ask me why she hasn't come back yet."

"Yet? When did you meet up?"

"The letter said 9 sharp." She looked slightly bemused. "Are you going where I think you're going with this?"

"WHERE?!" Kuzuryuu barked, making a number of people flinch.

Looking slightly annoyed, she said "I thought I just said she was doing some shopping. Rocketpunch."

The crowd of thirteen was directed to the shopping center, and a few people got the gist of the situation through the glass doors. The bell atop the door rung clear as the braver of the crowd made their way inside to inspect the figure slouching against the vending machine. They immediately wished they hadn't.

She was coated from head to toe in red, pooling around her slumped legs. There were gashes and cuts all over her face and limbs, going in all directions and leaving splatters where their trails logically continued. The frame of her glasses lay deformed in the mess, and it took them a little bit to see the glass embedded in the skin around her eyes.

It was a bloodbath, yes, but that wasn't the only striking thing about the scene. Everybody knew exactly what the killer was trying to do, and it was working. They'd seen this set-up before.

The baseball bat that lay to the side of her corpse helped make it a striking shot, for sure.

It had been less than a week since they had started their new lives, and the highly-trained murderer Peko Pekoyama had been left in a puddle of her own blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since the investigation and class trial will be in one part each, expect said parts to be a smidge longer than the earlier ones. Also, some small changes may be present in how the characters are represented in this fic compared to the game: most notably, Gundam's obvious obsession has been retconned into the HP Lovecraft universe and mythos surrounding it for the sake of being easier to write for me. Most of these shouldn't be too large to get in the way of anything.


	5. Chapter Two, Part Five - Deduction

Some would be inclined to believe that the moment after Pekoyama died, her very soul detatched from her body and sent her into a spectator seat for her own grisly murder. Some would say that she was sent into the black void that people who hadn't experienced the soul-crushing feeling it entailed called purgatory. Maybe she could have reappeared at the gates of Hell, ready to be accepted with open arms into the crowd of other trained killers. The wishful thinkers could say that she was watching over them the whole time. The more adventurous thinkers could see her repeating her last few moments of life and setting things right. Maybe this was all a dream. Maybe the whole turn of events was just one big convoluted mistake.

Perhaps they were in an entirely wrong universe.

In reality - in relative reality - the instant Pekoyama breathed her last, her mind accepted the feeling as death and shut down. Her being was ended with the equivalent of a switch being flicked deep in her psyche. The people who could see her actual body didn't even see a difference in attitude, they just knew in an instant that she'd be a vegetable for as long as they had no idea how to treat it. And maybe it was for the best that they didn't have a spirit staring slack-jawed at her mess of a corpse, nor the complete overreaction of the young master that was mere seconds away from happening.

Hell would have to wait a while to get Peko Pekoyama back into their ranks.

\---------------

The chime of the body discovery announcement thankfully broke the trains of thought of the few people who had gone up close to the bloodbath. Hinata's feeling of overwhelming pessimism had met the feeling that he was going to puke head-on. Gundam had been simply at a loss as to how to react past burying his face in his scarf. Chiaki was kicking herself for her advice for Kuzuryuu. Without really listening to what the announcement was saying, they stood silently waiting for it to end, not sure that they were going to speak when it was over. They weren't quite free of the shrill voice of the bear, though.

"Well, well, well. You guys really can't give a bear a break around here-"

They were all interrupted by the noise of a loud slap. By the time everybody had turned to the doorway to see what was happening, they could see Kuzuryuu's two fists being gripped mere centimetres away from Koizumi's belly. Bewilderment stayed on the redhead's face, rage stayed on the mobster's. His panic knew no ends, though, as he kicked off the ground and used his size to flip around the iron grip. That was the plan, anyway. The redhead brought her arms up higher as he attempted to spin around, keeping him at a picture-perfect horizontal as he came up.

His momentum hadn't died for good, though. He pulled his legs up to his chest and rode the way back down ready to deliver a solid kick to her chest. Koizumi, barely aware of what she was doing, kept a grip on his left hand, let the right go and turned to face him side-on, watching him veer off to the left right past her as if he was on a faulty swingset. She didn't have it in her to let go, though. Riding the momentum once again, Kuzuryuu turned the diagonal swing into another glide and landed on his feet, bounding with one foot to elevate himself and stare into her face with a fist ready to punch her out.

She stared, wide-eyed, into the limitless anger of Kuzuryuu as she brought another fist up far faster than she felt she deserved to and finally stopped the undying force that the mobster prided himself on. His legs flopped forward, his back stretched out to lay parallel to the ground and his head lolled back to the ceiling, face showing his clear distaste for what was happening. All he had to do was go down now.

Koizumi let go of the left hand, and dropped to her knees to catch the boy in a cradle that would have welcomed Saionji to more mockery of his height were she not completely stunned by what she was witnessing. The five seconds of conflict were over.

As the two were given time to let their adrenaline die down, the bear cleared his throat. "...Well if that isn't proof of you bastards' unwillingness to give me a _damn break,_ I don't know what is."

"Why won't you just die?"

Koizumi let him drop awkwardly to the floor before gritting her teeth, staring at her own hands as she would an alien's, slumping to the floor and generally having a freak-out. Kuzuryuu just stared straight at the ceiling, trying to mask the sounds of sobs as tears trailed past his ears. The crowd of onlookers deemed the problem as too volatile to touch, and so the few who wanted to contribute just shuffled past them as gracefully as the circumstances allowed them. And Pekoyama was still dead.

Hinata turned his head to face Monokuma. "Just give us the file."

Exaggerated sadness overcame the bear. "Is that all I'm worth to you? Just enough to get you kids out of this mess alive? I'll have you know my cute, cuddly demeanour is something that a lot of people would fight you for! Perhaps you should start looking for companionship in the more unexpected places rather than j-"

"File."

"Well just friggin' take it if you're that eager!" He recieved the file as it collided with the side of his head, though the bear was gone before he could even react. He passed it on to Chiaki and told her to look over it, making his way back towards the entrance of Rocketpunch. The dialogue he was expecting to hear grew louder as he got closer.

"How are you not dead already?"

"I don't know."

"How are you doing this?"

"I don't know."

"WHY are you doing this?!"

"I _don't know!_ "

Kuzuryuu rolled his head over to see Hinata walk closer. "I think your chaperon has arrived."

Hinata hunched over and prodded the fetal ball that was Koizumi as he tilted his head to give Kuzuryuu an expression somewhere between apathy and pity. He took the unimpressed nature of the stare with him, at the very least. 

"Tch! Well, I'll just go and conduct an investigation of my own." With that, he bounded up onto his feet and ran outside. A few heads turned at the sound of the bell, but Koizumi stayed persistent in her funk. Another poke to her arm did nothing to change it.

"Come on. You can't stay like that forever."

The dome of red hair shuffled a bit until her chin was resting on her knees. "Can I stay like this until the trial, at least?"

"You were probably the last person to see her alive, you know." He paused. "Second-last. You didn't kill her, right?"

Koizumi scoffed. "You know that the answer's gonna be no regardless of if I killed her or not."

Hinata squatted down in front of her. "Whether you killed her or not, you've got something to do, right? Gotta go tamper with evidence or spill your guts about your meeting. Something tells me you want to actually live another night."

"I'm not sure about that one, Hajime."

The cockiness fell from his face. Koizumi looked up and forced a smile. "Come on. If fate wanted me dead, it would have got me a while ago. Just... don't expect me to go near that mess of a crime scene, alright?"

"Can you tell what the killer were trying to do from here?"

She couldn't.

"...Because if you didn't do it, they were definitely trying to frame you."

"I'm a pretty easy target for it, though. Go on, do your investigation or whatever. I'll tell people what they want when we have the time."

Hinata did as he was told. He stopped at an aisle, before picking up a canister of Pringles and sending it rolling into Koizumi's legs. She smiled and nodded.

And before Hinata could get caught up in his relationship with the paranormal woman, he spun on his heels and made his way to the grisly murder that he knew nothing about.

\---------------

"Peko Pekoyama, Ultimate Swordswoman: dead."

There was a small circle of people by the vending machine listening with blank faces to Chiaki's reading of the second file.

"Time of death: roughly five minutes past nine. Died instantly from a single blow to the head."

The circle consisted of a stagnant Gundam, a distubingly calm Komaeda, Nekomaru searching nearby shelves with an open ear, Akane, Saionji sitting in the crawlspace between the vending machine and a shelf, Mikan doing her best to perform a more thorough autopsy, Hinata who'd just found his way back to the group and Ibuki, somehow, firmly looking away from the corpse. None of them seemed particularly upset that the first psychopath out of the handful on the island had bitten the dust.

"The victim overall ended up with a fractured skull, a broken neck, two broken legs, a burst eyeball and multiple cuts of varying properties mostly on their face."

Gundam blinked and broke out of his trance-like state. " _Mostly_ on her face? Where are the other cuts?"

Mikan looked up. "Ah, well, there is a cut on the undersides of each of her knees. They seem to line up perfectly, though, s-so if I could make a guess, I'd say they were both done in a single move. O-or I could just be falling into the killer's trap." She hiccupped, turned her head to the corpse and back again before asking "Oh, can somebody get me something to clean up this blood? I need a closer look at her face and, well, uh, it's a bit..." She looked back down at the body. "....hard to do."

Ibuki signaled off and disappeared into the aisles to do that. Hinata spoke up. "And a burst eyeball, too. How did that happen?"

Saionji spoke up from her crevice. "What did she have over her eyes at all times, ya dingbat? She died from a baseball bat strike from behind, you'd expect them to break when she hit the ground." She brought her arm up straight, before turning her elbow to mimic a fall. "Thunk!"

"Hold on..." Gundam spoke with sudden interest. "How do you know she was hit from behind?"

She turned to face him with a blatantly unimpressed look. "She's a hitwoman. And she died instantly. And she had to have popped her eye SOMEHOW. Call me out for making assumptions, sure, but it's just logic. I know you guys love that stuff." She noticed his face fall. "Oh. I getcha now. This was supposed to be the _"gotcha"_ moment, right? The one bit in all those cop shows where the bad guy says something he shouldn't and they realise he's the killer? Well, I hate to break it to ya, spacey, but I'M NOT THE KILLER." She huffed and turned back to face the wall. "Just let the pig bitch finish with the body and do what you guys always do!"

The silent decision to act like that never happened seemed like the right choice to everybody. On cue, Ibuki bounded back into the group with a frenzy that stood out even more than usual. "Okay, okay, guys, this is probably pretty important!"

Mikan looked back. "Er, uh, have you got a towel or something yet?"

Ibuki did, indeed have a white towel under her arm. She whipped it out and lay it flat like a matador, letting the large red smears in the center on it drip.

"Wow, whoever did this didn't really try." Akane wore her confusion plainly. "I mean, she's still drenched in blood."

"It means they could have killed her anywhere." Chiaki mused. "I thought it was a little suspicious that there was no smear where her body was dragged. That, or she died up against the vending machine. And spun when she died." She paused. "Or the killer was in the vending machine..."

"Ah, g-guys?" Mikan stuttered. "I think we might need to move the body. I-I mean, there's only so much I can see from here."

Some of the crowd nodded their heads, as the majority wandered to regroup away from the bloodied vending machine. Gundam piped up. "So, we don't even know where she was killed anymore."

"Let's fix that!" Nekomaru blared with his signature enthusiasm, giving Akane and Ibuki room to add their own spirit before the three disappeared into the aisles. 

Chiaki, Gundam, Hinata and Komaeda were left standing in a circle.

Chiaki spoke first. "I'll go and find out about these meetings that everybody went to. Somebody needs to find out where the murder weapon is, somebody else could go and ask for people's alibis and... well, Komaeda, you can find something else to do." She put on a smile. "Okay?"

Gundam and Hinata were very okay with this. Gundam and Chiaki made their way to the entrance, Hinata went to a far side of the store and Komaeda went back to the vending machine.

\---------------

Hinata rounded his first corner into a new aisle to find the sports section and, consequently, a missing metal baseball bat. Before his mind could progress from slightly stunned joy to suspicion of his sudden luck, his train of thought was stopped as swiftly as a real one would on contact with a wall of solid osmium by a horrible noise behind him. Calling up memories of old Chinese movies he'd seen in middle school, he spun on one foot with the other raised and brought his hands to eye level in what he thought to be a good way to line up a karate chop or two. The end result was what any practicing combatant would call the opposite of a tribute.

He met the eyes of Komaeda, drinking mineral water through a straw in a fashion similar to the most hated people in cinema viewings. He stopped drinking, pursed his lips and said "Well, you're not the Ultimate Martial Artist, that's for sure." 

Hinata got out of his ridiculous pose, looking as tense as ever as he stared bewildered at the bottle Komaeda held. It took him a few seconds to understand what he meant.

"Hinata, they just moved the body away from the vending machine. Do you really think I'd do something as brainless as that as a killer?"

And so he realized how meaningless this meeting was. Not fancying a conversation with the psychopath that he'd once nearly considered a friend, he turned back and walked over to inspect the baseball bats.

"I mean, that would take all the meaning out of this killing!"

He winced. Of all the people to meet here...

"There's still so much we don't know about the death, right? Like all of the cuts, and the broken legs, and where she died, and who has alibis and who doesn't!"

The baseball bats were, indeed, sturdy enough to bludgeon somebody. All of the ones in the shelf looked fine, from what Hinata could see. And that was a real shame, considering that he now had nothing but sheer willpower to try and drown out the sound of Komaeda talking. He picked up a baseball bat and held it in his hands as a baseball player would, only to realize that he had stopped talking. He turned his head to see if he was gone.

"I hate this drink."

Hinata put down the baseball bat for both of their safety.

"It'd like it could have been one of any number of soft drinks, but didn't bother to show what it could b-"

Hinata grabbed him by the shoulders and stared wide-eyed into his face, dredging up as much venom as he possibly could into one sentence.

"Then _why - the - hell_ did you buy it?"

"Well, I found this plushie stuffed in a drawer, and Monokuma gave me 10 coins for it. I'd never tried mineral water before, either!"

Hinata spun him around and pushed him towards the end of the aisle.

"Don't worry, Hinata. I'll take a hint."

"I hate you so much." 

He wasn't lying.

"Hate me enough to kill me?"

"...Yeah." 

Hinata still wasn't lying.

Komaeda turned the corner as the grin faded from his face and gave way to a stone-cold stare forward.

Hinata heard footsteps behind him and instinctively made the same dopey pose he'd done less than a minute ago. Nekomaru blinked.

"Well, you've got good reflexes, but if you tried to land a single strike in THAT pose you'd just fall backwards."

Hinata was not having a very good evening. "Why'd you come here?"

Nekomaru stretched his neck. "Ibuki found some blood, probably where Pekoyama was really killed. She's like some sort of good luck charm, I swear."

"Well, lead o-"

Chimes broke out around the shop, and suddenly Hinata didn't even have the small amount of time left he thought he did. The two headed for the entrance.

"So where was she killed?"

"Over by the back wall, apparantly. She found blood on the back of a surfboard."

Hinata didn't think the deceased was much of a surfer. "Anything else around there?"

Nekomaru thought back. "The surfboards were on the end of an aisle, so there wasn't anything else with them. On the other side from the surfboards, though, it looked like a bunch of tech-ish things to me. There were some power generators, night vision goggles, blenders, phone chargers, a whole bunch of cooking stuff... This store really does have everything, huh?"

Hinata didn't think the deceased was much of a chef, either.

"Hinata?"

"Yeah?"

"Were you one of the people who got a letter?"

He blinked. "No. You?"

"No."

The sound of their own footsteps grew louder to them. "Because, you know, we're going to be the first suspects here."

"That's nice."

"Mmm."

They still had a long, uncomfortable walk ahead of them.

\---------------

As soon as they met up with the rest of the group at the rocks, Nekomaru and Hinata disappeared into different sections of the crowd. Of course, they had no real reason to feel horrified around each other considering the amount of people who didn't recieve a letter, not that it made their single-word conversations any less creepy. Setting aside the walk, Hinata had some catching up to do, so he singled out the most useful investigator of the whole group.

"Well, aside from the victim and Koizumi, the people who went to the meetings include myself, Kuzuryuu, Ibuki, Mikan, Souda and Sonia. And according to Gundam, nobody has anybody to vouch for where they were for the entire afternoon. Which is reasonable, considering what's been happening in the last few days."

"And now we have a murder."

"And now we have a murder, yeah." Chiaki sighed. "Did you find where the weapon was?"

He did. "There were about twenty baseball bats sitting on a shelf on the far right side."

"What about the weapons that inflicted the cuts?"

"...I, uh, didn't find that." Hinata wished he'd seen the importance of that before he got sidetracked by the fanatic. "Wait, weapons? You mean there was more than one?"

Chiaki opened and closed her mouth, instead settling for a gesture aimed behind him. Hinata spun around and promptly collided with the nurse behind him. They both took a step back, one turning redder in the face and the other wondering how upsettingly close his life was getting to a romantic comedy, especially for somebody who needed an autopsy report. 

"W-w-well I was just about to t-tap you on the shoulder, but you just kept on talking and no time seemed like a good time to butt in, especially considering how you guys are probably j-just going to solve the case anyway..." Mikan's voice got quieter until it ceased to exist past silent, incoherent whispering.

Hinata got the feeling that the rock was seconds away from opening up again. "Just tell me the important things about the body. In short sentences. Please."

She straightened up, puffed out her chest and exhaled. "She had a few bruises that showed that she probably fell hard when she died. Her eyeball was burst from her glasses breaking. Ah, well, Saionji already guessed that. Um. Okay, big thing is that the cuts were done by t-two different blades."

His interest was peaked.

"Yeah, some cuts were wider and deeper than the others. There was one on her forehead, two on the backs of her legs and about five on her back. The ones on her legs were in the same place: her knees. But behind them. The cuts were bad enough so that she wouldn't have been able to walk, let alone stand after getting them. I don't think I would have w-wished that on anybody, not even her. Augh."

It was a sentiment that most of the island-goers shared, with the exception of a select few. Of course, one of these select tonight had duped at least six people to going different places, cut Pekoyama up, bludgeoned her, blinded her, handicapped her and fashioned her body to mock the death of a young girl. And this case was dumped into the laps of a group of high school students. Again. 

There was no doubt that everybody was looking around and profiling the people around them. The mythos fanatic. The bulky trainer. The dopey gymnast. And who could forget the grudging photographer with a penchant for close-quarters combat. The midget sociopath. The lucky sociopath. The mob boss who looked as if he was ready to strangle somebody where they now stood. 

Some had called this trip a twist of fate, but now they wondered if they could have ever lived a good life together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously sorry for the wait, though I wouldn't expect any shorter of a wait for the next part. We class trial now.


End file.
